Pioneers … Radiohead’s, In Rainbows set the template for a surprise release.

Radiohead’s In Rainbows was self-released in October 2007, in part to spite Terra Firma, the private equity firm that had taken over EMI, the record company they had been signed to on a six-album deal since 1991. Except it wasn’t, in the truest sense, a surprise. The band’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood announced it was coming 10 days in advance on the Dead Air Space blog, with a link to a dedicated inrainbows.com site, where fans could preorder a deluxe physical boxset version or choose to pay what they liked for a low-res MP3 version.

The band’s The King Of Limbs in 2011 was slightly more of a surprise, but even so, a 19 February release was announced on 14 February, although in the end they went a day early to create a frisson of faux surprise. Of all the major acts that have subsequently leaned on this approach, only a handful could be classed as genuine surprises. Beyoncé’s self-titled album suddenly appeared on iTunes in December 2013, with a video for every track, making it the most ambitious surprise release to date. U2’s Songs of Innocence in September 2014 was also made available free to every iTunes customer. My Bloody Valentine’s m b v was not on the same scale, but ended 12 years of silence after their last release, Loveless, and therefore ratcheted up the shock. Kid Cudi’s Satellite Flight: The Journey To Mother Moon last February also went to the wire, coming out with 24 hours’ notice.

This has been made possible by online distribution. The emergence of the internet was initially seen by the record industry as a threat, with pre-release album leaks becoming increasingly common. Digital also meant more music was released more frequently. Surprise releases came to serve three functions: to pre-empt piracy; to seize back some of the control lost to the internet; and to spin a marketing angle to stand out from the hundreds of other albums released that same month.

Richard Jones of Key Music Management says Pixies’ decision to follow this route for their three comeback EPs in 2013 and 2014 was partly a statement about the band’s independence, but also a reaction to the heavy front-loading of marketing that had become the norm. “The worst thing you can do is this pompous and long-winded announcement that new music is coming,” he suggests. “The internet has made everything immediate. Rather than seeing that as a problem, you can turn it to your advantage.”

Like Radiohead, Pixies were out of a record deal and Jones believes this made the whole idea of a surprise release much easier to do. “There are fewer people to deal with,” he says. “You haven’t got people [at a label] going, ‘Oh, this doesn’t work for Germany.’ You can be more maverick if you do it yourself.”

While Radiohead had to build a delivery platform from scratch, the Pixies piggybacked on BitTorrent for the release of Bagboy, the lead single from their first comeback EP – even though most of the industry saw the technology as synonymous with piracy. “Our thinking was that here was a distribution model in a completely different sector that we wouldn’t ordinarily interact with,” he says.

For Pixies, putting out music for free was partly about building a mailing list (you had to submit an email address to download the track); for Radiohead, it was about selling £40 boxsets so the free tracks could be treated as a loss-leader. U2, meanwhile, were paid by Apple; Jay Z, for the semi-surprise release of Magna Carta Holy Grail in July 2013, was able to give away 1m downloads as Samsung picked up the tab. Beyoncé, however, was focused on sales and chart positions, giving iTunes the first-week exclusive as a deluxe bundle with a video for each track and a retail price twice the average for a new album. It worked and the album sold 617,213 copies in its first three days in the US alone.

Equally, the abrupt release of the Where Are We Now? single by David Bowie on 8 January 2013, was partly to announce and set up the release of The Next Day, his first album in a decade, which came two months later. With an act of his stature, who many had presumed to have quietly retired, keeping it a secret was paramount.

Comeback … Pixies returned with no major marketing plan in 2013. Photograph: Michael Halsband

“I am told that only three people at Sony, including [chairman and CEO of Columbia Records] Rob Stringer, knew,” says a source close to the Bowie camp. “The interesting thing about the Beyoncé and Bowie releases is that Stringer was involved in both of them. He has given these artists this incredible leeway to do these wonderful things. He had probably the most respected artist on the planet and the biggest artist on the planet – and they both did this.”

Rather than give the Bowie track to a heavyweight digital service such as iTunes or Spotify and get them to promote it, it was left to fans themselves to whip up the flames of excitement.

“It was quite egalitarian,” says the Bowie source on why the song went live on YouTube first. “A lot of people, when they have a big album, will do exclusives. But here, everybody got the video at the same time. There was no exclusive. Nothing.”

In theory, getting a new album on to a paid download or streaming service can be near instantaneous. Ben Drury co-founded the digital music service 7digital in 2004 and says the company’s first big test came the next year during the Live 8 show in London’s Hyde Park. The show’s opening, a cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by U2 and Paul McCartney, was to be made available immediately after the performance ended. A runner with a USB key loaded straight from the mixing desk ran across to St James’s Square where 7digital and iTunes were awaiting the file. The iTunes team took a few hours to made the track available as they had to liaise with head office in Cupertino. 7digital got it up and on sale in 46 minutes.

“As we were a scrappy start-up at the time, we were used to having to hack things together and get them live,” says Drury. “We will usually get a day or two’s notice for a rush release – if we are lucky. Sometimes we get less notice if it’s a very big artist. In theory, we can put something live in a matter of minutes.”

Stage managed … Bowie’s Where are We Now?

Ingesting music into a download service’s central server and then linking it to its payment mechanisms so it can be sold can be swift. The biggest obstacle to surprise releases is the way the music business often buckles under complex licensing systems that can take this light-speed ideal of digital delivery and slow it to a sluggish crawl. Nowhere was this more apparent than during the run-up to the release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

For any digital track, there are three separate sets of rights: the composition rights, the performing rights and the rights in the master sound recording (often owned by a record label). Rarely are all the sets of rights owned by the same people. Radiohead owned their masters for In Rainbows, but the publishing and public performance sides were where it all threatened to come unstuck.

Jane Dyball was working in international legal and business affairs at Warner/Chappell, Radiohead’s publisher, when In Rainbows came out. She had been increasingly frustrated with how slow digital licensing was, and was contemplating pitching new licensing ideas to “people I thought would be up for a challenge”. A speculative email to Radiohead’s management proved serendipitous, as what she was proposing was inadvertently the solution to the problem they were struggling with as the secret plans behind In Rainbows grew.

She was summoned immediately to Oxford and brought into “the circle of trust” of about 20 key people, including the band and their management. “They were several steps ahead of me [with what they were proposing], but the bit they had struggled with had to do with the publishing,” she says.

They had to ensure no one outside the band contributed any work that might need a writing credit, to contain the rights issues as much as possible. In what was unchartered territory, they had to take the performing rights for In Rainbow away from the Performing Rights Society (PRS), which traditionally owns and administers those rights on behalf of artists – but in a way that did not alert anyone to the plans for In Rainbows’ release. “For online licensing, PRS has rules and rates that you have to abide by,” explains Dyball. “That would have prevented the band from doing their pay-what-you-like model, even though the band wanted to allow for publishing royalties to be paid.”

Dyball went to the society’s board with her pitch, asking that the rights for this one album be taken out of PRS. Although the songs were all written by the band, it was not a guarantee that the PRS board would agree to the band withdrawing their rights. It made it easier that the request came from Radiohead, whose stature was enormous. Consequently, In Rainbows was released as intended. When it went live, Dyball was at the head of the queue. “I have a plaque in my office saying I was the first person in the world to buy the boxset,” she announces. “That made it worthwhile.”

Today, few surprise releases are fraught with such complexities and, the more there are done this way, the more the licensing creases are ironed out. However, the more acts do it, the more cliched it becomes.

“People often ask us, ‘Is this what you’re going to do all the time?’” says Jones about future Pixies releases. “Next time, we’ll do something different because we’ve already done it.”

The Bowie source agrees that what was once exciting and unpredictable has become rote and anticipated. “It’s been done,” they say. “People now will just go, ‘Oh, they’re doing a Beyoncé’ or ‘Oh, they’re doing a Bowie’ with these things.”

Drury feels, however, they are just tapping into consumers’ shifting expectations in a culture of instant digital gratification. “It may not have the big bang marketing effect that it used to,” he says of such releases. “Consumers are now so used to everything being on demand that it has come to be expected.”

Therein lies the hindrance facing anyone thinking of doing it now. Like a magician revealing how they did their tricks, any act attempting to shout “Surprise!” today will probably be faced with their fans rolling their eyes in resignation and sighing, “I knew you were going to do that.”

The Surprise-o-meter

Not all surprise albums are equal. Here are the biggest ones ranked in order of most surprising to the most shambolic.

Huge surprise

Beyoncé – Beyoncé (13 December 2013)

There were rumours of an album being made but its release was downplayed. Rob Stringer, her label head, put people off the scent, telling media on 9 December that it was coming in 2014 and would be “monumental”.

Genuine surprise

U2 – Songs of innocence (9 September 2014)

Rumours circulated they were playing at an Apple product launch event on 9 September where the Apple Watch was unveiled and they would possibly be releasing an album. Spokespeople played it down. Apple CEO Tim Cook came on stage and said Songs of Innocence would be available later that day for free to all iTunes Store customers.

Real surprise

My Bloody Valentine – m b v (2 February 2013)

Announced on their Facebook on 2 February and their site was relaunched later that same day to sell it.

Single was a surprise to set up the album

The Where Are We Now? single was a total surprise. The album was announced and came two months later.

Single was a surprise

Pixies – (EP1 September 2013, EP2 January 2014, EP3 March 2014)

Bagboy was launched immediately as a video on 28 June and put it on BitTorrent on 1 July 1. EP1 followed in September.

A surprise following a label spat

Death Grips – Government Plates (13 November 2013)

The lead single came out in August but the album came out after the band had a fight with Epic Records, their label, and whacked it on to multiple filesharing sites without notice as well as SoundCloud.

A response to a leak

Bjork – Vulnicura (20 January 2015)

It was due to come out in March but it was leaked online so it was rush-released it on iTunes.

Sort-of cryptic and sort-of a surpise

Skrillex – Recess (March 2014)

Teased online on 7 March with his site playing clips and directing to an app that seemed to be just a game. The app had an unexplained countdown and then the album was unlocked when it hit zero, each track coming in 30-minute increments.

A sort of surprise

Radiohead – In Rainbows (10 October 2007)

Jonny Greenwood gave 10 days’ notice on the Dead Air Space blog and a link to the dedicated In Rainbows site.

A sort of surprise

Radiohead – The King of Limbs (18 February 2011)

Announced on 14 February that it was coming on 19 February, then put it out a day early.

Not that much of a surprise

Jay Z – Magna Carta Holy Grail (with Samsung) (4 July 2013)

Available to the first 1m people on certain Samsung handsets via an app. It got a full release on 8 July.

Rihanna’s Anti CD

A shambles

Rihanna – Anti (27 January 2016)

It had been teased for months but leaked on Tidal two days early. It was pulled but then put back on and the first 1m downloads offered for free. Made available on iTunes a few days later.